Date: 10/3/2007

Uncle Dave alerts us to content-freeing software, Version 2 of bFree, the Blackboard Course Extractor.

The popular bFree application has been revised to extract far more material from a Blackboard course archive, and to make your exploration and use of that material easier.

The program now extracts Announcements; Discussion Board entries, archives, and attachments; and Digital Drop Box and group File Exchange uploads. It continues to extract wiki entries and attachments, Staff Information and attachments, and Content Area pages, including folders, descriptions, links, and attached files of all kinds. Tests, Gradebook, Surveys, Assignments, and Pools are among the content items not yet supported.

bFree will quickly create an independent web site for a course. The site can be placed on a web server or CD, or even loaded into Sakai. The web site mimics the structure of the original Blackboard course.

The interface now displays previews along with the course outline, and provides a larger area for previews. All texts, titles, names, and descriptions can be searched to locate materials of interest.

(The bFree application is Copyright 2006-2007 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License. Your suggestions and comments are welcome; send them to David_Moffat@unc.edu.)